I was recently privileged to participate in a project led by the Graduate School of Business of the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal (UKZN GSB).
The initiative called LED Champions entailed identifying and supporting social entrepreneurs, mainly in the rural and township areas of KZN, with a social entrepreneur being defined as one whose business activities have a meaningful impact in the areas they operate in, in a word more than just turning a profit for the operator.
The participants spanned many economic sectors, from clothing design and manufacturing poultry farming, life skills and career training and egg farming.
What was striking were the personal attributes common among the 10 odd businesses:
• A ‘can do’ attitude: while grateful to be part of the project and in line to benefit from funding, they were not going to let not being a prize winner hold them back. They had plan B’s and C’s already developed.
• A deep understanding of the market they serviced and the community they lived in, and what the impact of their success could have in it.
• The importance of investing in their businesses first.
• The trajectory of their businesses over time.
• Sharing of scarce resources and knowledge to the benefit of their locality.
• Deep appreciation for any support – financial or otherwise already received.
On the negative side, almost all of them had interacted with various government departments and entities tasked with developing small businesses ,at some time, with all of them being underwhelmed by the attitude and level of service (if any) received.
This is a serious indictment on these institutions and departments: here you have established businesses with some traction, led by passionate hard working individuals, in need of a little bit of assistance to catapult them to success being side-lined, either by design or indifference.
The most demoralising fact for me was, that between all of them, the total ‘ask’ in money terms, was less than R2-million, a miniscule amount set against the billions that had just been plundered through Covid-19 procurement schemes.
It was clear from my engagement with them, that a dynamic, passionate and socially conscious cadre of entrepreneur exists in every corner of our country, and if those tasked with assisting them would make the effort to exercise their mandates fairly and professionally, our economic prospects would be transformed in a very short time.
After matriculating, Vijay Naidoo studied Economics in the UK. Upon his return, he joined the family construction business as MD for 10 years.
He subsequently joined his sister in their furniture manufacturing business as director for quality assurance and operations. He was responsible for all quality aspects of their products, and led the project to the business achieving an ISO 9000 quality accreditation. As an export focused business, this was important for our international competitiveness.
Mr Naidoo has an abiding interest in quality management and productivity improvement, particularly in manufacturing.
More recently, he has focused a lot of his time on giving back to the community by way of mentorship of small businesses and sitting on the executive of the South Coast Chamber of Commerce. He also sits on the Board of the Ugu South Coast Development Agency.
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